果冻影院

A new project called 4M - Microbes, Milk, Mental Health and Me - has recently been funded 拢6.9M by Wellcome鈥檚 to understand how gut microbes and feeding in early life shape long-term mental health.

4M will enhance the longitudinal birth cohort study, funded by Wellcome鈥檚 programme, which is following more than 10,000 children and their families from pregnancy and birth to adulthood to understand the factors that shape health and wellbeing over the life course.

Mental health problems pose a huge public health challenge, and yet we know little about their origins in early life. 4M explores the idea that gut colonisation with bacteria and other microbes, strongly influenced by breastmilk and feeding, might be important in how and why these conditions occur.

The 4M team, led by Prof Louise Kenny (University of Liverpool) and Prof Nigel Field (果冻影院), will collect biological samples from participants taking part in C-GULL. This will create an internationally unique archive of paired samples from 7,000 mothers and babies, which we will use to identify key bacteria and milk constituents that affect neurodevelopment and mental health.

果冻影院鈥檚 Prof Argyris Stringar is also involved in the study. Argyris will provide expertise in child and adolescent mental health and oversee the assessments of babies from birth to 24 months in the first instance.

Prof Nigel Field said 鈥淥ur vision is to unlock knowledge that will be used to design interventions, which might be dietary or live bacterial therapies, to prevent or optimise a child鈥檚 resistance to mental health problems later in life.鈥�

The 4M project is a collaboration between the University of Liverpool, 果冻影院, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the University of Manitoba, and Cardiff University.

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